The Minor Fall
by literaturewank
Summary: A retelling of the Hound in Sansa's bedroom on the night of the Blackwater. Modern AU, Sandor-centric POV.


**A/N: Fic takes place in AU where Sansa is eighteen in Game of Thrones, and as per canon, Sandor is thirteen years (if I've got that right?) older than her, and they each age approximately one year by the events of the books, as per canon. Unbeta'd, unedited, un'picked. Characters are not my own. Quotes and excerpts from the books are not my own. Song lyrics are not my own.**

In the bleariness of his drunken stupor, he forgets that he went up, not down to the garages to grab his bike and _run_, but up, up, up to that slice of heaven that doubles as his personal hell, to break into that gilded cage, to break into that gossamer girl. He stumbles through the door, confused and reeling, until he trips over the chair to her vanity, and his drunken mind clears a bit. His thoughts disgust him and he will never admit that they frighten him as well, but the Hound drowns them in more wine, rights her chair (although he couldn't tell you why), and collapses into the little bird's queen-sized bed. He remembers why he first came here, to steal that song, but the smell of her duvet distracts him; there is something more to it than the laundry detergent the maids use…but then, his mind wanders once more with the overpowering scent of fire and _burning_ in the sky. How juxtaposed it is – ash drifting through those delicate lace curtains as they waft in and out of her open window.

The Hound rolls off of the little bird's nest and near tears the curtains down in his clumsy haste to shut the window, to keep the view of the torched bay from his sight. Nothing can damp the burst of the mines exploding, or still the shudder of the ground beneath him.

He feels sick.

Honoured guest that she is, the Stark girl has her own suite, bath and all, and he gags over the sink, sick with nothing but the wine in his stomach. Too much, too fast. A wonder that he had not passed out in one of the hallways. He spits into the sink and avoids the mirror, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. The Hound takes one last swig of wine, to settle himself, and staggers back to the little bird's nest, with its pillows and its plushes, and the dead rose from the tourney, pressed, stapled to the wall. He snorts and falls into oblivion.

When the Hound comes to, he is angry, he is sore, and he is blinded by the dim light of the reopened window. The smell of everything burning is overwhelming once more, and the little bird is framed by the red, angry night, fireworks and flares throwing everything into confusion behind her, out the window, her silhouette frozen. His anger, his despair, it all comes rushing back to him, and he is broken, and he is jagged, and he is ready to cut something on all his sharp edges; her hurt would be a hellish baptismal for the man he angrily steels himself to become. As if he's not already halfway there. As if he has not already burned, is not yet still burning.

The girl whines for something as she backs away from the window, and she is less than an arm's reach away from him, so the Hound grabs the little bird by the arm, and pulls her close. Despite his ill-intentions, he hoped that she would stay with the cunt in Maegor's warehouse, if only to save her from him, him from himself; yet, despite his premonitory regrets, his relief is palpable. The Stark girl jerks, tenses, ready to wail, and he presses his other hand to her mouth. A wave of dogged desire rears up once more, and the Hound doesn't care to tamp it down, not really, not considering how this night has gone, how he intends it to go. Hand pressed against her lips, his thumb lightly tracing the curve of the lower, he squeezes her to him more firmly. He forgets that he is spattered with blood, sooty and sweaty from his exertions in the massacre below, and lets himself, for a moment, focus on the mere feel of having pulled her between his legs, of his hand around her wrist, and the other hand nearly caressing her face.

"Little bird. I knew you'd come." The world spins a bit, and she just stares at him, and he is too far gone in his wine to think anything of it, the moment from before is gone, and he recalls he came with a reason, not for a chat. Any tenderness, as odd and rare and wrong as he could give, seeps out of him, and he is replenished with a twisted feeling of loss, for her and him both. "If you scream, I'll kill you, believe that."

He knows that she will scream, but his head, his throat, he's screaming for more wine, and so he removes his hand from her face and seeks out the bottle he'd brought with him, dully happy that it had not spilt. He drinks, and he does not look at her, and he drinks some more, and he can hear her sharp, little panicked breaths, but she does not scream. He wishes she had shrieked, screamed, shouted, anything – he would have ended it right there, quick and clean for her, but without such an excuse he can't help but be selfish.

Despite the pulled curtains, another blaze boils the sky and as muted as it is, the Hound cannot help but notice it, and it pulls him back into the firefight, before he fucked off with his tail between his legs. "Don't you want to ask who's winning the battle, little bird?" His tone is mocking, he doesn't expect her to ask. He doesn't expect her to care. Even if he leaves right then, there is no happy end for her, no matter who wins.

As dutiful as ever, the little lady asks, "Who?" in her sweet, wavering voice.

The Hound barks out a laugh, not over her asking, but at the obvious truth of the answer, "I only know who's lost. Me." He chokes on the laugh, maybe the wine is making him feel too damn funny to breathe, but it's so pathetic that it's funny, in much the same way Boros and Trant are, with their Bluetooth headsets and their over-altered guns, and their pathetic little pride over _a job title_.

The little bird surprises him, questioning him further, asking a question that should not be asked, "What have you lost?"

"All."

The fact that he is in her fucking bedroom is proof enough of that; if he has nothing, _nothing_, then who could damn him further for taking? He fears no gods – all punishment lies in the hands of those upon this earth, and what could be worse than what he has already been given? He has nothing, and that gives him the freedom to take. That last bit of human resistance within him? Piss on that.

Even after sleeping off the worst of it, the Hound sways on the side of the bed, ignoring the plush animals crushed under his thigh, and tries to regain his thoughts with what little sobriety he has. The building quakes with another burst from an activated mine, and he focuses on the last indignity he faced, "Bloody dwarf. Should have killed him. Years ago."

Her wrist is still in his hand, gods, that tiny wrist makes him look even more monstrous, and she strokes the back of his hand with her fingertips, as if she's attempting to be _reassuring_. "He's dead, they say," telling him that as if that's supposed to make him feel any better, any better at all. He's in her fucking bedroom. He's on her fucking bed.

"Dead? No. Bugger that. I don't want him dead." A mild fury possesses the Hound, the thought that any of them could have a quick finish, that everyone but him gets the easy way out – he wants everyone to suffer, the Lannisters, the Starks, the Tyrells, the Baratheons, the bastards, the baristas, the whores, the septons, all of them. Everyone should be as pained as he. Even the little bird. And that, he has within his power. He doesn't remember shoving the wine bottle off the side of the bed, but he hears it shatter. "I want him _burned_. If the gods are good, they'll burn him, but I won't be here to see. I'm going."

Suddenly, fear trumps her little courtesies, and the little bird jerks away, trying to break his grip on her arm.

"Going?" It's more a squeak than a chirp, but she is hardly mousy, with that lovely hair and those doe eyes. Still, she's a little bird. _His_ little bird, if he has anything to say about it.

"The little bird repeats whatever she hears. _Going_, yes."

"Where will you go?"

"Away from here. Away from the fires. Go out the Ironside, I suppose. North somewhere, anywhere." For a moment he feels he is telling her too much, but the Hound resigns himself to knowing that one way or the other, it doesn't really matter.

"You won't get out," the little bird suddenly informs him. "Cersei closed up Maegor's Warehouse, and the city lines are blockaded."

"Not to me. I have my badge," he scoffs at this, "And I have _this_._"_ The Hound taps his thigh holster and the girl blanches. He grins, drinking in fear that is not his own. "The man who tries to stop me is a dead man. Unless he's on fire." He can hear the cracks in his own laugh, he's fit for breaking.

"Why did you come here?" The Stark girl would not have been so bold with her question had she known it would be so precipitory, but it moves the Hound to action.

"You promised me a song, little bird. Have you forgotten?" He can tell, from the look in her eyes, that she does not catch his meaning. Even in this den of lions, she has remained oblivious, and it sickens the Hound as much as it marvels him. He nearly finds her insistent innocence enviable, to ignore the worst of the world. But the Hound ultimately finds it frustrating, galling, willfully _stupid_.

"I can't. Let me go, you're scaring me."

Yes, _he_ scares her. He wonders if he scares her the most. More than that pretty boy sociopath who held a gun to her head on a yacht when her brother's SWAT had overtaken a Lannister post. The Hound grunts – half in amusement, half in melancholy. "Everything scares you. Look at me. _Look_ at me." He's a bit deranged at the moment, sick and dizzy from the wine, heart thrumming and high from the thrill of the fight earlier, high from something else too, maybe. He never really keeps track. He's not thinking at all, he's thinking too much. "I could keep you safe." Suddenly the words are there, and that's never what he meant to do when he came into the fucking Stark girl's room, but plans change, he could do it, he could – "I could keep you safe. They're all afraid of me. No one would hurt you again, or I'd kill them."

The little bird is so warm, and he pulls her closer, thinking, thinking – but he stops that dangerous line of thought, he came her to hear her _sing_, to fuck her hard and fast and chip away at whatever was left of him, of her, blow it all to bits. He didn't come to think of kisses. And how could he, when she steels her face like that, a practiced preparation for something unpleasant, something to be _endured_. Joffery could at least be thankful that it wasn't so plain on her face, that she put up that feathery little mask whenever she was forced to endure him, but the Hound gets no such courtesies, it seems. Some childish, little part of him bubbles up, whining that it isn't _fair_, but he shoves it down and away; the truth hurts but not so much as disillusionment, not so much as knowledge of the façade preventing your enjoyment. So, he decides he is thankful for her obvious distaste. He wants her to show it to him.

"Still can't bear to look, can you?"

It sounds more a choked sob than a growl to his ears, and that feeds his temper all the more. He pulls the little bird around until it is her on the bed, not him. The Hound arches over her, arms to the sides of her head, and face only inches away. His thigh is pressed between her legs, and he reaches between them to pull out his Beretta, coarse hand brushing lightly against the smooth expanse of her skin, her skirts indelicately hiked up around her.

"I'll have that song. One of your silly love songs." The Hound presses the barrel of the gun against her temple, the metal too cool against her warm, agitated skin. "Sing, little bird, sing for your little life."

The girl just lies there, wide-eyed, at as much of a loss as he, apparently. He cocks the gun for want of something to do; maybe it will enlighten her as to what he really wants, maybe it will inspire her to grab him first, before he decides to wreak havoc, with the gun, with his fist, with his cock. He never thought this far. Maybe he should shoot her, a quick finish, no crying, no mess. His stomach lurches and roils at the thought of what he's done, what he's doing, what he's going to do, but he blames it on his inebriation, decidedly keeping what little of conscience he has left, out of it.

But then the little bird does the last thing he expected, the last thing he wanted.

She sings.

_I've heard there was a secret chord  
>That David played and it pleased the Lord<br>But you don't really care for music, do you?  
>It goes like this<br>The fourth, the fifth  
>The minor fall, the major lift<br>The baffled king composing hallelujah  
>Hallelujah, hallelujah<br>Hallelujah, hallelujah_

Suddenly her voice gives out, and he hears a wracked sob being dragged from somebody's lungs and it is not from hers, but his, and he should've known that the stupid, little bird would actually think to sing. He climbs off of her and takes the gun from her head, and before he can move further away, she is cradling his face in her hands.

"Little bird."

He can think of nothing more to say. She has cleaved him in two, and she doesn't even know it.

Sandor clears himself off of the bed, numb with shock, and leaves Sansa in the dark room, with fire lighting the sky, and nothing more than a well-worn jacket.

**A/N: Okay, so, this has been in my head for almost two years now. And uh, this is a tiny fraction of it, but I was tired of keeping it in my head, and I wanted to get it out. It was inspired when I was listening to my ipod on a run, thinking about how a modern asoiaf fic would utilise music. I mean, you gotta still have stuff like the Rains of Castamere and so on, but Sansa singing a Christian or religious song from "our world" really irked me for some reason. And then Regina Spekor's cover of Hallelujah came onto my ipod and this fic was born. I have a binder full of how I have plotted out the whole thing. The beginning would be a Modern AU retelling of the first five books as they related to Sansa/Sandor, but the majority of the book I have plotted and planned out takes places after the fact, a reunion, of sorts. Ideally, when I finish it will be 100k+. IF I finish. Because, mind you, these 2k words have been in my head for two years before I got brave enough to put them to paper. Doesn't matter how much I have plotted out, it's the writing that scares me. And if you've seen my other psued, then you'd know that I've been very sick and that has prevented me from writing, and that is still very much the case, although I've gotten a bit more well since then. But I also have a lot less time, working two exhausting, time-consuming job. So. Ergh, sorry to complain all here.**

**Okay, so I've been dying to share my playlist for this fic, and I was gonna wait until I had the whole thing written, but that could be forever and a half from now, but here's my playlist, it's mildly spoilery for things I may eventually write, haha. I was gonna provide links, but I only have so much character space apparently. And it's unfinished.**

**1) Hallelujah - Leonard Cohen/Regina Spektor/ George Blagden/Rufus Wainwright**  
><strong>2) Fairytale - Sara Bareilles<strong>  
><strong>3) Creep - RadioheadAmanda Palmer**  
><strong>4) Loser - Beck<strong>  
><strong>5) Your Honor - Regina Spektor<strong>  
><strong>6) Paper Bag - Fiona Apple<strong>  
><strong>7) We All Go Together - Tom Lehrer<strong>  
><strong>8) Beauty and the Beast - David Bowie<strong>  
><strong>9) Piano Man - Billy Joel<strong>  
><strong>10) Lady - Regina Spektor<strong>  
><strong>11) Beautiful - Belle and Sebastian<strong>  
><strong>12) I Want to Sing - Regina Spektor<strong>  
><strong>13) Dear Catastrophe Waitress - Belle and Sebastian<strong>  
><strong>14) The Boy with the Thorn in His Side - the Smiths<strong>  
><strong>15) Bigmouth Strikes Again - the Smiths<strong>

**Okay, seriously tho, Hallelujah has been my SanSan theme for two years now. I adore it. It makes me cry because I can't hear it and not think of them. Please let me share that with you, please think so too T.T**

**Holy fuckin' shit, it's 4AM here, and I'm vaguely out of my mind on cough syrup and mucinex, excuse the rambling please. And errors. Shutting up now, even though I feel like I'm forgetting something.**


End file.
